Artificial Intelligence and Scientific Method [Paperback]

Artificial Intelligence and Scientific Methodexamines the remarkable advances made in the field of AI over the past twenty years, discussing their profound implications for philosophy. Taking a clear, non-technical approach, Donald Gillies focuses on two key topics within AI: machine learning in the Turing tradition and the development of logic programming and its connection with non-monotonic logic. Demonstrating how current views on scientific method are challenged by this recent research, he goes on to suggest a new framework for the study of logic. He draws on work by such seminal thinkers as Bacon, G?del, Popper, Penrose, and Lucas to address the hotly contested question of whether computers might become intellectually superior to human beings. These topics will attract a wide readership from followers of advances in artificial intelligence, to students and scholars of the history and philosophy of science.

Chapter 1: The Inductivist Controversy, or Bacon vs. Popper
1.1. Bacon's Inductivism
1.2. Popper's Falsificationism
1.3. Kepler's Discovery of the Laws of Planetary Motion
1.4. The Discovery of the Sulphonamide Drugs
Chapter 2: Machine Learning in the Turing Tradition
2.1. The Turing Tradition
2.2. The Practical Problem: Expert Systems and Feigenbaum's Bottleneck
2.3. Attribute-Based Learning, Decision Trees, and Quinlan's ID3
2.4. GOLEM as an example of Relational Learning
2.5. Bratko's Summary of the Successes of Machine Learning in the Turing Tradition, 1992
2.6 GOLEM's Discovery of a Law of Nature.
Chapter 3: How Advances in Machine Learning Affect the Inductivist Controversy
3.1. Bacon's Example of Heat
3.2. The Importance of Falsification
3.3. Bacon's Method has only recently come to be used
3.4. The Need for Background Knowledge
Chapter 4: Logic and Programming and a New Framework for Logic
4.1. The Development ofl³"